An Inconvenient Art

An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.

With Al Gore winning arguably the world's most prestigious award, the Nobel Prize, for his campaign to educate people about climate change, it seems like an opportune moment to mention an exhibit that takes us to the planet's polar regions, where some of the most visible evidence of global warming exists.

Gore calls the issue a moral and spiritual one, and a visit to "Photographs from the Ends of the Earth" at the Milwaukee Art Museum is a convenient spot to contemplate the incovenient truths Gore points to.

And it is more than that. It is a place to contemplate the desolation, beauty and inhospitable nature of the world's extremities and the ways in which they've fascinated humans since the time of Pytheas of ancient Greece, who wrote of the aurora borealis and the land of the "midnight sun" in the 4th century.

In the show, these vast regions that most of us will never lay eyes on, are framed for us by photographers working over 130 years, from the earliest explorers to contemporary artists.

A collection of photographs from the American Geographical Society library, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, were, in part, the inspiration for this show, which was curated by Lisa Hostetler, assistant curator of photographs.

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Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher. Every week, you'll get the latest reviews, musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends.